The Nobel Peace Prize should go to those who really support
peace
By Andrew Bernstein
web posted October 14, 2002
The Nobel Peace Prize was just awarded to Jimmy Carter.
Although Carter's efforts to convince Egypt to recognize Israel's
right to exist was a genuine achievement, he has otherwise
continuously betrayed the principles on which peace depend.
For many years Carter, espousing collectivist ideals, has traipsed
the globe treating aggressor and victim with equal respect. For
example, he aided the nuclear program of North Korea, the
most repressive dictatorship on earth and part of the axis of evil.
Carter's trip last May to Cuba, where he sanctioned and
supported the dictator Castro, is just more recent evidence that
he understands nothing of rights and peace. In choosing Carter
the Nobel Committee has shown yet again that it does not
understand the cause of war and so of peace.
To understand the cause of war, consider the major wars of the
20th century. World War I was started by the dictatorial
monarchies of Germany and Russia. Nazi Germany caused
World War II by invading Poland. Totalitarian Soviet Russia
repeatedly initiated war by first aligning with Hitler in the
conquest of Poland, then by swallowing up Eastern Europe in
1945, and later by supporting the Communist invasion of South
Korea.
And consider recent but less global conflicts: Saddam Hussein
instigated the Persian Gulf War by conquering Kuwait. The
Taliban, former dictators of Afghanistan, warred against other
factions in Afghanistan and then spread its terror overseas by
arming and abetting Osama bin Laden's attacks against the
United States.
Observe the pattern. It is the less free nations -- those in which
power is concentrated in the hands of the state at the expense of
the individual -- that attack their freer neighbors. Such statist
regimes, which deny any rights to the individual, are the cause of
history's most savage wars. Statist regimes launched the wars
that ravaged much of the world in the 20th century. The reason
why these regimes did so is not difficult to find.
Dictators are in chronic war against their own people. Hitler
murdered the Jews; Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot each murdered
millions of businessmen, landowners and bourgeoisie; Milosevic
slaughtered the Muslims, Saddam Hussein butchered the Kurds.
In her seminal essay, "The Roots of War," Ayn Rand observed:
"A country that violates the rights of its own citizens, will not
respect the rights of its neighbors. Those who do not recognize
individuals rights, will not recognize the rights of nations: a nation
is only a number of individuals."
Statism is the cause of war.
Statism rests on the idea that men can legitimately pursue their
ends by initiating force against other men. In a free country such
acts are properly regarded as criminal and punished by law; in a
free country government uses force only in retaliation against
those who initiate it. But statist regimes of all varieties -- Nazi,
Communist, Islamic Fundamentalist, etc. -- initiate force
ceaselessly against innocent victims, first within their own borders
and then without. In a free country it is recognized that every
individual has an inalienable right to his own life. In a statist
country the individual exists in bondage to the state, his life to be
sacrificed at the whim of the state.
Shamefully, the Nobel Committee has repeatedly awarded its
Peace Prize to the bringers of war.
For example, it routinely bestows the prize on statists who
condemn the United States -- the world's freest, most
individualistic country -- while praising murderous Third World
dictatorships. It awarded the 1994 prize to Yasser Arafat, the
brutal dictator of the Palestinian Authority, who imposed a
despotic regime on his own people and initiated a murderous
war against the free citizens of Israel. Even worse, in 1973 it
awarded the prize to Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese
Communist, who, along with Ho Chi Minh and other Party
leaders, imposed a vicious Communist dictatorship in North
Vietnam that slaughtered at least 50,000 Vietnamese in the
1950s and then invaded and conquered South Vietnam. All told,
the death toll caused by that Communist dictatorship and its
warring totaled two million individuals.
If one admires men who cause war, one will ignore or vilify men
who promote peace. Those who respect and support individual
rights and political/economic freedom are the only true lovers of
peace. Private capitalists and businessmen are outstanding
examples. Business requires the barring of the initiation of force.
Businessmen deal with one another peacefully, by means of
trade, persuasion and voluntary contracts and agreements.
Because businessmen respect the rights of all individuals, they
have helped liberate the best minds to innovate, invent and
advance, and thereby helped produce great general prosperity
and peace. By helping to spread free trade across the globe,
they have created peaceful relations among the individuals of
many nations. Yet perversely, capitalists are denounced as
exploiters of man.
If we sincerely seek to attain the inestimable value that is world
peace, it is individual rights and therefore capitalism that we must
endorse. Capitalism is the only political-economic system that
protects individual rights by banning the initiation of force. As
Ayn Rand observed, it was capitalism that gave mankind its
longest period of peace -- an era in which there were no wars
involving the entire civilized world -- from the end of the
Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in
1914.
If we truly want to recognize and promote the cause of peace, let
us award a peace prize to Capitalism.
Andrew Bernstein, Ph.D. in philosophy, is a senior writer for the
Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the
philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The
Fountainhead.